In February 2008 a book by Gabrielle Wolf titled “Make it Australian: The Australian Performing Group, the Pram Factory and New Wave Theatre” was published. (Currency Press – ISBN10 0868198161). The Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist Mark Doyle, better known by the name Louis Nowra, wrote the following review of the book, outlining why he thinks it doesn’t tell the full story.

“Inside the collective”

By A NEW BOOK ABOUT A NOTORIOUS MELBOURNE THEATRE TROUPE DOESN’T TELL THE FULL STORY WRITES PLAYWRIGHT LOUIS NOWRA

THE AUSTRALIAN, MAY 24, 2008

“YEARS after the incident, a still astonished Sydney director described his visit to Melbourne in the early 1970s for a meeting with members of the Australian Performing Group, the vanguard of the new wave theatre movement. He attended a gathering of the collective in the morning, where there was a serious discussion about Bertolt Brecht. Afterwards he was invited to an Australian football match. The transformation was incredible. These rational theatre people turned into banshees, screaming abuse at the umpires and opposition supporters. With a resigned tone, similar to the end of Chinatown, where a baffled Jack Nicholson is told, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” I said to the director, “That’s Melbourne for you.”

I should know. I lived in Melbourne during most of the APG era of the late ’60s and ’70s before I hightailed it to Sydney. While I was at university I was aware of exciting things happening at La Mama in Carlton, the theatre that gave birth to the APG. Founded about 40 years ago by the under-appreciated Betty Burstall, La Mama was formerly an old shirt factory.

The space was so intimate that the audience could smell an actor’s bad breath. The location was also serendipitously perfect. Inner-Melbourne Carlton was filled with university students, bohemians, nascent writers, young academics and, most importantly, cheap rents. Within a couple of years a motley group of actors and playwrights left La Mama and relocated nearby to a much larger space, the Pram Factory, where, in January 1970, they formally inaugurated the Australian Performing Group.